Next year (in a matter of months, in fact) I'm getting married. Married. That's forever - no matter if he goes deaf or gets fat or fights me on turning on the heat every year / day / second. Til death.
Now I'm a pretty romantic and/or irrational person. Think about it. When I was 19 I flew across the Atlantic to visit a boy I'd met in Italy, had known for 5 days and been alone with for a matter of minutes (and kissed for most of those minutes).
Sure, we'd emailed and talked on the phone a couple of times, but basically I'd been intensely bored for a summer (after returning for Italy I worked for the MOD in helicopter engine allotments. Don't ask.), which addled my brain somewhat, and I couldn't get the boy out of my head. So in a moment of madness / inspiration, I booked a flight to New York City and got Jeremy to drive the 6+ hours to pick me up (I knew he lived in New York, I didn't know that Ithaca NY was a billion miles from the state capital [yes, I know, isn't really the capital but it bloody well should be]).
I didn't know I loved him when I flew over there, although I had my suspicions. But Love, I believe, takes a little time to dig deep past infatuation and intuition. By the time I'd left the states after spending a week with Jeremy, I'd voiced it and in saying it out loud, allowed it to take root.
When I left him at JFK for the first time of many future times, I had no idea of how those goodbyes would come to weigh on my shoulders - how I would dread them before we'd even said hello. I said 'I love you' without consideration of what it would mean - because I didn't believe it could be otherwise.
And then there's marriage. Forever. Til Death.
I recently told my mum that marriage is a decision made on the basis of the evidence. That you can't possibly know the future but you weigh up the facts and decide whether you're in with a chance. She informed me that I was being entirely cold-hearted and unromantic and worried that my pragmatism signalled uncertainty.
You see, this time I, we, knew the weight of goodbyes, knew the problem of Time Difference, the pain of Distance. And while my heart said 'this has to be', my head had to stop and check.
We talked at length about what marriage would mean. Where would we have children? How often would we visit our families? Who would move first? Would I be able to leave my mum without crumbling? Would this time be different - could I be happy and settled in America? We knew that marriage would mean a life-time of one of us being homesick, one of us being foreign. And we asked the question - can we give this (us) up? Because if we can, we should. We couldn't.
I'm pretty sure my mum still wishes I were running around breathless and fancy-free, not giving a second thought to the implications of marriage. But in my book, the stopping and checking, the acknowledging that what we had in eachother overcame / overruled all of the difficulties and compromises, makes it all the more romantic. We weighed and outweighed the cost.
And then I waited 6 months for Jeremy to summon the courage to ask me.
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